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Unity 8 Will Bring 'Pure' Linux Experience To Mobile Devices
sfcrazy writes If you have tried the live images of Ubuntu Next you may worry that Canonical is trying to do a Windows 8 with Ubuntu. That's not true. There is no need to worry though: A great deal of work is happening at a deeper level that may not have yet surfaced. It will surface eventually, however. Will Cooke of Canonical clarifies: "We are trying to make it clear that Unity 8 desktop will look like the traditional desktop and will behave like a normal desktop. We are very aware that our users expect a normal desktop there."
Unity 8 will offer the traditional desktop interface when it detects a desktop. The same OS will switch to a touch-based interface on touch-based devices such as tablets and smartphones.
Unity 8 will offer the traditional desktop interface when it detects a desktop. The same OS will switch to a touch-based interface on touch-based devices such as tablets and smartphones.
A great deal of work is happening at a deeper level that may not have yet surfaced. It will surface eventually, however.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Isn't pure linux a contradiction in terms?
All 3 Unity users must be thrilled.
Someone tell this guy, the entire Linux community has spoken... we do not want this.
On install, ask if this is a mobile device... if it is, install your screwy new UI. But no-one will click that option because there's already a fantastic Linux distro for mobile called Android.
If they don't chose mobile (and no-one will) then install a "normal" desktop.
And since you seem to be unaware of history, what you're doing is exactly what Microsoft attempted with Win8 and failed miserably at. No one wants this but you so please give up.
Seriously, what don't you get... Unity was released in 2010. Here's a graph showing distro use:
http://royal.pingdom.com/wp-co...
See how your distro use tanked in 2010? And Mint Spiked? Your users have spoken... listen!
it better switch to desktop mode when i plug in mouse+keyboard on my Z ultra.
Looking for people to chat about multicopters, coding, music. skype: gtsiros
So will next year be the year of the desktop on Linux?
Yeah, it wanted to be Metro so bad, it went back in time and came out years before Metro just so it could be even more Metro than Metro. THAT's how bad it wanted to be Metro.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Does this include stealthy trojans and kernel lockups?
So... basically "Don't worry - the least-liked Linux shell will continue to have all the things you hate and that drove you away from Ubuntu ages ago."
There is a reason why Ubuntu is loosing customers to Mint.
.. then we know *for sure* they are not trying to do a windows :p
Does it mean that I will finally be able to mess with my xorg.conf file and be frustrated because I can no longer get anything working in graphics mode ?
Moved to KDE, never looked back. Unity seemed to be so dumbed down that it was unusable outside the most trivial "the web browser is my desktop" use.
KDE isn't perfect, but its heart is in the right place at least...
so... We get to blame XZIBIT for it?
Metro came from the Zune's UI design which predates Unity.
Back in the day a command was pure if it could be made resident in memory and called repeatedly without having to be reloaded from disk.
So you will have to spend hours editing config files and getting called a noob on forums in order for the game to even load and then it will be slow and lockup? cool!
what kind of severe form of autism do you need to possess to think unity in*anything* is a half-decent idea?
currently there are a number of 32bit tablets running windows 8 and they are remarkably cheap if lacking a little in the ram department.
These tablets would be great for Linux if it was possible to run on any of them. £150 with windows 8.1, with a proper linux distro. I would buy one, i might even dual boot it if there was enough space. I wouldn't even begrudge buying an iso file from canonical at a reasonable price if the hardware was fully supported.
There is work being done to support some of these tablets but it would be great if canonical could find some devices it could fully support. I don't think another tablet will be on my christmas list this year and i'm not going to buy another android device that is abandoned at birth by it's manufacturer again.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
That likely means you have to memorize how 350 different 2-letter-abbreviated command-line utilites work along with 17 or so switches each one has... Everybody will flock to do that.
The vast majority of linux users use Ubuntu, with Unity (they don't know what XFCE is). They just don't post on Slashdot. Take a look at this Google Trends frequency of search terms here.
Mint barely registers compared to Ubuntu. (Also, distrowatch really is useless).
The only people I know (aside from a few sysadmins with RHEL) that run another distro are my parents, because I put Mint on their computer. I just use FreeBSD now.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
Apple got it right. They made one operating system for their desktop. It's a "pure" desktop operating system. Their mobile device operating system is an entirely different operating system. The two can work together but they are entirely different operating systems for entirely different platforms that serve entirely different roles. This farcical attempt to make one operating system for every type of device leaves you with all of the compromises you don't need to make. It's fine if you want to make your tablet more flexible and expandable with a detatchable keyboard but it's still a tablet. It needs a "pure" tablet operating system. The last thing you want to do is take a desktop operating system and slap a tablet UI on it.
No, it isn't a good attempt.
It's an aggressive attempt, taking plays from both M$ and The Fruit. But in no way does that make it a good attempt.
they had these devices called televisions, and like programming on those old visions I recalled DONT TOUCH that Dial...hehe, it is the same then as it is now, turn the channel if you dont want certain content, the same with OS distros, 'nix, windows flavors etc, dont like it dont install it
So they're just compiling the kernel to the device? Frankly, that doesn't sound like a finished product. They should at least get vi working, ffs.
Its going to be all shell commands and text base? Think someone is confusing the GUI with the OS again.
If you have tried the live images of Ubuntu Next you may worry that Canonical is trying to do a Windows 8 with Ubuntu. That's not true.
Oh, good, so no need to worry then.
There is no need to worry though
You just told me there was no need to worry when you said it wasn't true; now I'm worried that you keep telling me not to worry.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
I use Mint on my desktop, but write "Ubuntu" when I search on google. I think a lot of people do this.
You get more/better hits when you search for "Ubuntu" and the proposed solution will work on Mint 99.9 % of the time.
So... basically "Don't worry - the least-liked Linux shell will continue to have all the things you hate and that drove you away from Ubuntu ages ago."
At least give them points for being consistent.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
I use Unity. There, I said it. Said it before, in fact.
Unity is buggy. Quite buggy, to be honest. Compiz sucks - it has since the beginning - and Keyboard behavior is sometimes erratic right up to unusable.
However, I get the overall concept of unity and I think it's a good one. My Mom can use it, which is a good sighn. And it's not nearly as intimidating as the crap we see on other desktops.
This summer I've gotten myself a 15" ThinkPad, installed Ubuntu 14.04 on it and bought a Logitech Performance MX mouse to operate all the extra expose functions and stuff as I'm used to on my Mac at work. It's cool. For a FOSS based OS it is really neat - can't complain about that.
That said, it's far from primetime, especially since the hardware integration is no where near the experience you get with the fruit company.
I do hope to see a full-blown convergence device based on linux one day - if it's unity based and they've fixed the glaring bugs until then, I'd have no problem with that either.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
OP gets things turned around: Canonical released the Unity interface for Ubuntu in the summer of 2010, and then made it the mandatory desktop on Ubuntu in mid-2011 sparking an exodus of users to other distros, Windows, and OSX. Without getting into some curious timing... Just about a year later in the summer of 2012, Microsoft released the Metro interface for Windows 8, copying many of the tiled UI ideas and touch/gesture-on-the-desktop that had been rejected by more geeky and novice users alike -- only this time into a far larger market.
Honestly, from inside Redmond it was very strange to watch this happen, with a lot of people asking 'what the hell are we doing?' and variations on 'didn't the little guy fall on his face when he tried this?' The parallels were almost comical; with Ballmer and Sinofsky insisting that "customers like this!" in words almost identical to Shuttleworth two years earlier, and similar expressions of dismay and denial of the humiliating reception that followed. Though Ballmer and Sinofsky wielded market power Shuttleworth could only dream of, the outcomes were predictable and there had been plenty of warning. The hard part for these guys to accept is that when your ideas are so thoroughly rejected by people/consumers/end users -- and you keep doing the unwanted thing anyway -- it's not like the audience remains as motivated to see what you come up with next**. They just start ignoring you.
** (even if the very same UI concepts work well in another context -- in this case, on a mobile handset)
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I think not...(*poof*)
The scary part is that for everu Ubuntu user there is 10 Chromebook users. Ubuntu needs to stop dinking around and start selling a cheap netbook with ubuntu on it. The problem is that ubuntu needs an i5 with decent video card to be useable. They have bloated the hell out of linux.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
You get the Useless Use of Cat Award
http://www.smallo.ruhr.de/awar...
cat is for conCATenating multiple files.
grep bob phonelist | dial
No. Look at distrowatch. Unity promoted millions of users over to Mint, with its choice of sane front ends.
So no Unity?
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
99.9% may be overstating it a little. I just updated a Mint install, and the way I chose was to manually edit the PPAs by replacing all the references to Ubuntu Quantal with Ubuntu Trusty, running a 3 hour update in the graphics mode, then looking at what was now the new download sources list and editing it again for the sources that had changed naming conventions and weren't being found, looking up source PPAs online for them, etc and running a second update which also added another two hours. This is not the recommended way - Mint thinks people should preferrably back up all their files to some other physical storage device and reinstall from scratch using a newly burned disc, but I didn't really have 3.4 terabytes of physically discrete storage handy. Mint's standard references for updating give a 4 year old link to another, 3rd party page that (sort of) explains how to do it the way I did, while warning it's not for basic users and will probably hose your machine, etc.
I was updating a Kubuntu box (that was also back on Quantal) at the same time, and it was a matter of command line "sudo apt-get update", "sudo apt-get dist-upgrade", etc., but I could have done it using the graphic updater interface (Muon or whatever it is now). That update took about 1 1/2 hrs total for about the same number of files, but of course, the additional software, machine configuration and such varied.
Mint appears really comitted to an update model that avoids what they see as safety issues with Ubuntu/Kubuntu updating. I can respect this but it means they aren't the best at supporting more advanced users who can still use the command line when needed or trust some of the graphic updaters out there. The Mint site says there is really no need to upgrade unless the user just wants to be on the cutting edge, but right now, for just one counter-example, running a distro based on Quantal will leave you with a version of Firefox old enough that G-Mail will automatically post a warning saying it's insecure and no longer supported. That combination is bound to be one of the most common for Mint users, and I susspect there are a lot of them wondering how to manually update Firefox from a Tar/gz, or the whole distro the proper Mint way or whatever.
Who is John Cabal?
Sorry Canonical but haven't Jolla already stolen your thunder?
Distrowatch numbers don't even begin to matter. I thought that was a well established fact now.
Unity has turned my Linux experience into a phone UI. .. and I still hate it.
The problem is that ubuntu needs an i5 with decent video card to be useable.
Ubuntu with Unity, perhaps. But since three years ago when I did sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop, I have had no major problems running it on a four-year-old Dell Inspiron mini 1012 with an Atom N450 and 1 GB of RAM.
Android is open source. Google Play Store is not. If you implement certain features into your device's version of Android, Google will refuse to license Google Play Store to you. This means people who buy your device will end up without apps that are exclusive to Google Play Store, such as Ingress.
When I can just cross-compile my favorite Linux software into APKs, install and run them on my phone or tablet, then you can call Android a Linux distro.
I wonder why someone hasn't cooked up something with a lightweight X server and window manager that wraps a standard GNU/Linux app compiled with NDK. What's the biggest obstacle for that? Is it the 50 MB limit for APKs on Google Play Store?
I'd agree that distrowatch is a useless way to measure. I'd love to know how badly Ubuntu was affected by its decision to annoy a large part of its user base with Unity and various other things. The Google trends graph you posted shows Ubuntu in steady decline from its peak in 2008 -2009.
Here's another metric. A search of http://unix.stackexchange.com shows the following results:
Debian - 3,118
Ubuntu - 2,757
Mint - 2,156
Does anyone have any *real* numbers on the usage of various distros?
Are you fucking kidding me? I have no idea why people ever think of Distrowatch as mattering. All that it measures is page hits to Distrowatch's info page about that distro. It only measures what people who go to Distrowatch click on at Distrowatch. Notice that the numbers are in the low thousands per month at best. Their audience is longer-time Linux users who remember it from like fifteen years ago.
Google search volumes are by far a more accurate gauge of interest, as it is both a much larger sample, and a more uniform sample, as a broader range of people use Google than visit some fucking site that was cool during Slashdot's heyday. Sampling 101.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
I have a hard time believing that accounts for a significant percentage of Ubuntu's search volume. If both had the same popularity, for example, and even one third of people wanting info about Mint searched for "Linux Mint," if Ubuntu had a search volume of 166, then Mint would have a search volume of 33. This is a much smaller relative disparity than actually seen. And the likely case is that while some people searching for Mint information query for Ubuntu, most are still going to search for Mint.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
I was just too lazy to switch until the past few months, where all that effort trying to work around the interface built up to the point where I got fed up. I didn't mind trying out a new way to do things, found shortcuts that helped my workflow, and definitely gave Unity a fair shake. I just found my ire building up, instead of what was promised to me which was an improvement that I might have to learn to appreciate. Sticking with it since its introduction, I just haven't found that promise to come true.
I switched to Mint at the tail end of 17.0 and have upgraded to 17.1, and it's been a pleasure, everything works the way I expect and there aren't any quirks. Tailoring the default install to what I wanted was intuitive, and didn't take very long at all (just disabling window snapping/tiling). The options aren't hidden away somewhere secret and are clearly labeled. I'm very happy. Granted, this is based on a history of working with KDE 2/3, Gnome 2, and prior to that the Windows interface, so I've been used to something similar the whole time I've been using GUIs. I don't know what someone with fresh eyes or born and bred into a world where smartphone interfaces are what you learn first would think of Unity. But for me, I'm extremely happy with Cinnamon and I'm pleased that with every new release they don't change the way things work.
Twinstiq, game news
Exactly. Apple took a useful feature like gestures and translated it in such a way that it became a useful feature in an intuitive way on the other platform. It's the same basic concept and works in a way that makes sense on one side and the other. And they did it without forcing one UI into an environment for which it is entirely inappropriate.
When I'm doing real work on a desktop, whether it's at work or when I'm doing my hobby programming, I want a real desktop with real tools to get real work done. On the other hand, when I'm doing simple tasks on a portable device, I find the desktop to be far too cumbersome. They are two entirely separate tasks with different needs. Forcing someone to use a tablet UI when doing real work is just as bad as forcing someone to use a desktop UI (or worse, a shell) on their phone.
The fundamental concept of the desktop windowing interface has not changed since the early X11/Mac/Windows days. It's a model that works and gets the job done. Sure, they were primitive back then and very many enhancements have been added to tweak the model to make it better over the decades. But the fundamental concept hasn't changed at all. And there's a good reason for that. When it comes to using a computer to do real work, the windowing model that has been in place for over 30 years is a very good model that works very well when it comes to doing "real work" on a computer.
There's a good reason why Apple and Android mobile devices don't use that model. It's a very cumbersome interface to use on a handheld device. It just doesn't work well for performing the tasks that you perform on a device like that. That's why they both were given an entirely different UI that has little or nothing to do with the classic windowing model. It's a completely different device with a mostly different set of tasks to perform. And even though some of the tasks like web surfing are similar, the way they are performed are different enough that the UI is justifiably different.
As tablets become more capable, will there some convergence between desktops and mobile devices? Sure. Will touch screens on desktops become useful? Almost certainly given time. But that's no reason to force the tablet UI onto the desktop. No. Instead, the two platforms should be kept separate. Where there is convergence, take from one side and interpret the feature in such a way that it makes sense and enhances the other side. But for the love of all that's holy, please stop trying to have a one size-fits-all UI for both mobile and desktop platforms. Because it just won't work. It can't. They are two separate kinds of devices with two entirely different modes of operation and the way they are operated cannot be merged into one single UI. There must be separate UIs for each. And as Apple has convincingly demonstrated, you can have synergy between the two without destroying the usability of either.
Google Groups is a good indicator about distros popularity too.
Apple has already ported some iOS features to OS X: run Launchpad, then click and hold on an application. Doesn't it look like Springboard (the internal name of iOS GUI) ?
They are porting some features. But in a way that makes sense and is usable in the other platform. They aren't putting the same UI on both operating systems.
aaah yes, another answer to a question no one is asking! Canonical is fucking awesome at doing that!
Why do I need or want mobile capability on my desktop? They need to put out separate editions, like server edition, desktop edition, and mobile edition. I don't want the security vulnerabilities of a mobile OS on my desktop.